Sustainable Construction in a Circular Economy

As Executive Director of the Healthy Materials Lab, Alison leverages her practice-based experience as an architect and her knowledge and experience as a long-term academic leader to confront one of the more serious and often overlooked environmental challenges of our time: the health of the built environment. How do we make profound and long-term changes to everyday design practice to create truly healthy buildings, especially for those in the most need of affordable housing? HML creates resources, educational programming, and prototypical innovative housing models for a new post-petroleum world. Alison is co-Principal Investigator of the Healthy Affordable Materials Project (HAMP). The Project is a long-term coalition of four organizations that work together to remove harmful chemicals from the built environment. She is also the recipient of multiple grants that support the work of the Lab.

 

Alison’s work draws from The New School University’s long tradition of commitment to promoting community-based sustainability, social engagement, and environmental justice, especially in her teaching in architectural design studios at Parsons. She lectures widely disseminating current thinking within the field of material health.

 

Alison Mears and Jonsara Ruth were awarded the 2022 Women in Architecture Innovation Award from Architectural Record and co-edited the 2023 publication Material Health: Design Frontiers.
 

Catherine is a trained artist, designer, and educator. She has 12 years experience in designing and project managing healthier and sustainable interiors. Her current focus is on developing processes to enable change and strengthen a sustainable and regenerative built environment. As an educator she teaches classes on materials and guides the development of methodologies to eliminate toxics and reduce environmental impacts. Her practice focuses on renovation, re-use, and repair of existing structures; implementing core design and construction techniques to build healthier, affordable and sustainable built environments.

Catherine had led educational programming at Parsons Healthy Materials Lab since 2017 and holds a Master of Fine Art in Interior design from Parsons School of Design and an hons degree in Fine Craft Design (Embroidery) from University of Ulster, Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is from Sligo in the west of Ireland.

Dennis is an architect with a background in civil engineering and agriculture. His strength is a holistic and collaborative spatial design approach, with a focus on solving environmental challenges and creating human-centric places. He believes that compact + livable + walkable cities are humanity’s greatest invention, and that places at all scales should be designed to create a positive impact on people’s lives. With over 15 years of professional experience, Dennis has worked at various firms in Toronto, New York, and Amsterdam on a wide variety of urban, landscape, building, and interior design projects. He is a Senior Associate as SvN, where he leads projects focusing on the integration of architecture and landscape with urban and ecological systems.